A Defense Of Liberalism

 As someone over 30, I admit to struggling at least a little with the increase in Trans rights activism. As a liberal, I believe in freedom and debate. As we saw on numerous yard signs and bumper stickers: We believe in science here.

Jon Chait has been a consistent critic of extremism, which is a characteristic of liberals. He has taken a position on Trans Rights that are broadly liberal: We should be cautious about transitioning children until we have more evidence. We should also be worried about how activists on either extreme hijack the debate.

As a liberal, I fully support gender affirming care for children, but care that stops short of easy transitioning. I arrive at this position after 30 years of working with adolescents. Gender affirming care that entails counseling and therapy to help someone with gender dysphoria through adolescence can then become sex reassignment when they become adults. We don't let teenagers rent a car, why should we allow them to make a potentially permanent decision? Put biologically, their prefrontal cortexes are not fully developed and they are poor judges of future consequences.

However, I do not in any way deny the right of young people with gender dysphoria to define their gender in however they wish. I admit that I don't understand it; it's completely alien to my own lived existence. But I am empathetic to the need to define one's identity for oneself. 

The extraordinary gains that Trans Rights have made have allowed more people to question gender roles and define themselves as they see fit. The idea that waiting until your 18 to transition represents an assault on their human rights is not "following the science."

Chait's crusade against activist extremism was tiresome at first. How can you complain about campus leftists when Trump and the Trumpenproletariat exist? However, he's absolutely right that extremism - which is to say positions far outside the mainstream - do tend to engender their own backlash. As I've argued before: Revolutions always fail; they snap back into the forms that existed before in slightly altered forms. 

Sensible moderation does not let you fundraise off outrage. It tends to reject outrage as emotive and unreasoned decision making. Yet sensible moderation - Let kids define their gender as they see fit and if they ultimately define themselves in a way that requires transition, they can do so as adults - is a position that makes the most sense, given what we know today.